SOCIAL MEDIA AND DIPLOMACY
focuses on embracing technology and communications tools while reaching out to new players. Today’s State Department works on different fronts. It has incubated ideas — not just technology per se — to create a better balance between what Professor Slaughter calls the ‘Billiard Ball World’ and the ‘Lego World’. The first is ‘a world in which states are reduced to their heads of state, their foreign ministry, and their army, and they interact with other states almost entirely in terms of power’, Slaughter explained in her remarks at Penn State University in March 2012. The second is ‘a world in which states come apart […] and have the ability to network or partner or make an alliance with social actors. […] It is a horizontal world. There are no ladders because there are no hierarchies. It is a web. Power still exists in a web, but it is exercised from the center, not the top.’[4]
TWITTER FOR DIPLOMATS
Twitter and other social media tools have made this transition quicker and smoother, but certainly not without tries and errors.
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